Azure Functions without Premier Tier

Question

How can I use Functions and private endpoints. We do not want to use premier tier due to cost constraints

Is there any alternative workaround

Answer 1

@R Peaks Thanks for reaching out.

Assuming that you want to communicate with your function app and other azure resource limiting the inbound traffic without using the premium tier and want to see if private endpoint works with any other tier.

Azure Private Endpoint is a network interface that connects you privately and securely to a service powered by Azure Private Link. Private Endpoint uses a private IP address from your virtual network, effectively bringing the service into your virtual network. You can use Private Endpoint for your functions hosted in the Premium and App Service plans. However, if you do not want to use the Premium tier due to cost constraints, you can use service endpoints to ensure inbound traffic to your API app comes only from the subnet used by your front-end web app.

Service endpoints help to secure the API app, but you could still have data exfiltration from your front-end app to other apps in the app service. When you use private endpoints, you don't have the possibility of data exfiltration.

Here are some considerations to help you decide which method to use

• When you use service endpoints, you only need to secure traffic to your API app to the integration subnet.
• When you use private endpoints, you have two subnets at play, which adds complexity. Also, the private endpoint is a top-level resource and adds management overhead.

In case if you have any other requirement then please share more details so I can assist you. You can refer to this document for more details.

If you have any other queries, then please let me know.

Answer 2

Hey @R Peaks what is your use case? If you can provide more info we can try and offer some alternatives

The short answer is the private endpoint feature is not supported on the consumption plan.

That being said; if you use an App service plan to host your function then the basic tier supports private endpoints https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/app-service/networking/private-endpoint

But, there are some differences to the way the plans work and the pricing for the basic plan is highly likely to end up more than a function running in consumption (however this very much depends on the usage profile).
In general App service isn't a good hosting choice for event driven functions that need to scale for "bursty" loads (if the function here isn't event driven, or it is and it's a predictable scale then that's easier).

For more info on hosting options see https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-functions/functions-scale#overview-of-plans